- From: N. Coesel <nctnico@cistron.nl>
- Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 13:37:35 +0200
- To: www-talk@w3.org
Hello all, It seems I have stumbled across an interesting problem: I've developed a web-site for a customer which relies heavely on a database with nearly 1 million records in several tables. To relief the CPU and memory I've decided to deploy a front side proxy (proxy cache on the webserver). Most of the pages have a life-time of 24 hours by using the 'Expires:' header. This setup seems to work quite well, but there is one major drawback: There seem to be active proxies at the client side. This means that more and more sites will refresh their caches every 24 hours. This results in a huge amount of wasted bandwith since no-one (= a person) at the client side actually requested the document. I've read the parts that concern caching from the RFC2616 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 ) but it seems there is no way to tell an active proxy cache at the client side: "Do not refresh this document until somebody actually wants it!". Did I overlook a possible solution or is this really a new problem? It seems more websites are moving towards front side proxies to reduce the load on database servers so this may become a potential problem for the internet. For some reason I also posted this message to the www-html list (probably cut&paste from the example page). My apologies to anybody who has received this message twice. Nico Coesel
Received on Monday, 1 July 2002 07:31:09 UTC